thedeadlyhook (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thedeadlyhook) wrote2004-04-24 04:44 pm
thedeadlyhook) wrote2004-04-24 04:44 pm
Bad Trip, Chapter 12
More dreams, the edge of underneath, and the hospital gets more visitors than usual. (Edited at 9 pm PST to revise one of the Xander scenes, because it was bugging the hell out of me.)
Previous parts here
ACT TWELVE: AT THE GATES
"This," Neena cried, "is just impossible!" Her fingers clenched in frustration, and she started pulling the knotted threads apart once again. "Bet makes it look so easy. I must be doing something wrong."
"Is it just me," Lo asked, "or is that chanting getting louder?" She looked over at Neena, who was standing with her back to the window in the otherwise empty hallway outside Xander's room.
"I believe it is." Neena gave up on her Cat's Cradle and squinted through the glass, shading her eyes so that she could make out the details of the dark landscape beyond. "It seems we can anticipate visitors." Tiny pinpricks of light were winding their way through the blacked-out streets, like luminous millipedes inching towards the hospital. The sound was still very faint, but they could hear distant voices shouting in unison.
Sliding down the wall, Lo collapsed into a cross-legged pose on the floor. "Wonder what they're saying," she mused. "What do we want? Brains! When do we want 'em? Brains!"
Neena turned from the window with a frown. "That's not funny, Lolita... Sorry, Lo."
"Thank you, Miss Kulkarni." Lo raised a hand to her face and began absently chewing on a couple of knuckles. "They're coming this way, aren't they?"
"Yes. From what the staff were saying, these people have been gathering outside the hospital for the last few nights, but have yet to take direct action."
Lo sighed. "I betcha their luck's gonna change now that we're here." She paused for a minute, and then started in alarm. "Oh shit. Are those gunshots?"
The two girls exchanged anxious glances. As they listened, they heard a couple more sporadic bangs, apparently coming from just outside the hospital building.
After a minute, Lo spoke. "I vote we go see what's happening."
Neena pondered, fiddling nervously with her loops of tangled thread. "I don't know. Our priority is to protect Mr. Harris..."
"And we'll have a fine time doing that once this place is overrun by torch-wielding maniacs, won't we? C'mon, Neena. The junior misses can handle things up here." Lo stood up, and stretched with a heroic yawn.
"Very well." Neena stuck her head through the doorway of the room and let Bet and Graciela know they were going for a quick stroll, pretending not to notice that she'd just startled Graciela out of a light doze. Then she hastened after Lo, who was already striding off towards the elevator.
"I can't help thinking," Neena said as she fell in beside her comrade, "that we ought to consult with Kennedy or Willow before taking action."
Lo snorted. "Sorry, captain, but they're strictly in Do Not Disturb mode. It would be one thing if they were just catnapping or..." and she lifted her fingers in sarcastic air quotes, "'gettin' frisky.' But since it's past midnight, they've probably started with the spell-casting already. And I really don't think we should go messing with that." She recalled the pain of Willow's energy blasts, and reflexively winced.
"Ah well." Neena thumbed the down button next to the elevator doors. "At least we'll find out all what the chanting is about."
...........
Xander wandered the hospital alone for quite some time. Outside the relative quiet of Intensive Care, the halls appeared to be crowded with gurneys, loud with sobs and screams. Spatters of blood were visible on the floor, smears of it on the walls. And he'd seen things--people. Others like himself who could walk ghostlike in and out of objects. They seemed to be everywhere.
Spirits, he thought. Like me. People on the brink of death. He refused to think of them as ghosts, even though that was definitely what they looked like--they hovered around every corner like something out of The Sixth Sense, lost and pale and confused. They shuffled back and forth slowly, their mouths moving as if to speak, but no sounds came out. He'd gathered up his nerve at one point to try to talk to a couple of them. There'd been no sign that they had even heard.
And although the hospital surely wasn't that big, it seemed like hours had passed before he ran across Spike again. The vampire was standing motionless in front of an elevator, staring at the closed doors as if he expected them to speak. Several restless spirits were milling around him, like moths drawn to a light bulb.
Xander hesitated for a moment, undecided, then padded over to join the crowd. The wanderers parted to let him through, without otherwise seeming to realize that he was there.
"So, this is the hot hangout spot, huh?" he asked, trying to sound casual. His tour of the sixth floor had bothered him much more than he cared to let on, and the shuffling shades were hardly helping. When the going gets freaky, any company's better than nothing. Even the evil dead undead.
Spike gave no response.
"It's funny, you know. You showing up," he tried again. Attempted to clear his throat, realized he couldn't. Ghost. Right. "I mean, feels like we've done this whole quest thing before." C'mon, Spike. Talk to me.
There was a long pause.
"Is that right," Spike said dryly.
Finally! "Yeah, I mean--well, that spirit guide I was talking about? He--"
"Look," Spike turned to him finally, his face a mask of strained patience. "I didn't ask to do this. Really don't like you. Really don't want to talk to you. Wouldn't be here at all if I had a choice."
"Oh." Well, okay, no shock there. But talk about a conversation stopper. He thought for a moment. "So why are you here then?"
"Because the gatekeeper wants you to see the works, didn't you hear what I said? You get a tour of the underworld so you can take back knowledge to the land of the living. Dante must be spinning in his grave."
"Dante? What, like the Nine Circles of Hell?"
Spike's expression was one of pure astonishment. "Where in God's name did you hear that?"
"X-Men Annual 4."
Spike blinked, returned to door-staring without comment.
"Why does this gatekeeper want to show me anything?" Xander persisted. Anything to keep the conversation going, anything to not think about the hell portion of that thought. Tour of hell. I am so not ready for a tour of hell. "I mean, I did that spell over a week ago. Did the vision quest thing, got the T-shirt... Thought that was it. I mean, that we were done."
"Nothing's ever done, don't you know that yet?" Spike grimaced, as if pained. "You did your spell, paid your price. Now you're getting what you asked for."
It took a moment for Xander to figure it out. "So the spirit guide, that mystical whatever-it-was that looked like you--that was the gatekeeper? "
"Dunno about what he looked like. Didn't get much of a look at him myself. Likes to keep the lights low, he does."
Elusive and mysterious, check. That fits. Xander pondered his words further. "What did you mean about paying a price?"
"Always a price with magic. The universe doesn't do something for nothing."
"It was just a spell. The usual chanting and--"
"Oh, right," Spike cut him off. "Words don't mean a damn thing, do they? Just names and nonsense."
Xander held in his anger with some difficulty. Like you'd know anything about it. "I'm just saying. There was no price."
"None that you knew to ask about."
Xander fell silent then. Because it was true that it hadn't occured to him to think about the details of the ritual, and the Wicca woman hadn't given him any explanations. The spell had been in another language. He'd had no idea what he'd been saying, what he might have agreed to. Okay, now's a good time to start wigging. It's starting to sound like I'm under some sort of contract. Disturbed, he struggled to think of a subject change.
"Waiting for something?" Xander finally asked.
Spike snorted. He raised a hand, passed it through the controls. "Waiting for someone to come along and use the lift, you twit."
"Why not just walk through the wall?"
"And then what? Climb the ladder?" He lifted his hands, dropped them. "Good luck with that."
"Why not? You're standing on the floor. And can't ghosts--I dunno, fly?"
A wince. "You're a wandering soul, Harris, not Peter bloody Pan."
The two stood side by side for a moment.
"So why not take the stairs?"
Spike made an irriated sound. "Fine," he grated, then turned and stomped off without waiting toward a door marked STAIRS. Passed through the closed panel and disappeared.
Xander stared in surprise for a moment, then shrugged and followed.
And stepped through the door into madness.
...........
Willow splashed through the tunnels, ankle-deep in water and struggling to keep up with her companion's rapid strides. "Buffy?" She stumbled, and clutched at the mossy rock of the tunnel wall for support. "Wait up. It's getting pretty dark in here."
Buffy came to a halt. Still keeping her back to Willow, she looked up at the ceiling, where metal pipes ran like veins along the winding length of the tunnel. Fluid leaked from the pipes in steady rivulets, spilling down into the waters that covered the floor of the passageway.
"I could have sworn I paid to have this fixed," Buffy muttered. She turned, looking back at Willow. "I'm sorry, did you say something?"
"I said," Willow replied, stepping unsteadily through the water, "it's getting dark in here. Not so good for the seeing." She frowned. "What are we doing down here, anyway?"
"I always end up down here, Will." Buffy's face was unreadable in the fading light. "But you never come with me, do you?" She began walking back along the tunnel toward Willow. "Angel, Spike... Riley, Dawn... they've all been down here with me. And Xander... I swear, you can't keep that boy away!"
"It's not healthy," Willow protested, shrinking back a little. "I don't think you should stay down here, either. You could catch something."
Buffy chuckled. "I already have. Comes with the job." She extended her hand, its fingers glistening with something dark and wet. "Here. This will help you see."
Something warm and liquid caressed Willow's face, brushing across her eyelids. A moment later, she felt a flare of heat, and for a second her vision was overwhelmed by a flood of brightness. She yelped and stumbled backward, rubbing her eyes, and little by little her sight returned.
"Open your eyes," Buffy said, "and see what is hidden in darkness."
Blinking, Willow looked about her, and discovered that the lighting had indeed improved dramatically. Not only that, but the scene had changed again; instead of a cramped tunnel, a subterranean cavern arched above their heads, tangled roots protruding through its walls. The two of them were now standing in what appeared to be an earthern pit sunken into the cavern's floor, perhaps five feet deep. As she took in the scene, Willow was surprised to see that the cave was furnished with bookshelves, cabinets, tables, chairs--even a television set. How cozy, she thought. You could almost live down here.
"Hey, Dawnie," Buffy yelled. "A little help here?"
Willow whirled about in surprise, and saw Dawn seated at a folding card table, across from a fleshy, wrinkled creature who looked as if he'd been left out too long in the sun--Clem, she remembered, that was his name. They appeared intent on something on the tabletop, but from her vantage point at the bottom of the pit she couldn't tell what it was.
"Sorry, Buffy," Dawn called back, eyes still fixed on the table. "Clem's helping me with my lessons. I have to do a report on the Battle of Waterloo." She raised her hand and moved something on the tabletop.
The wrinkled creature yelped in dismay. "You sank my battleship!"
Willow heard a creaking noise, and looked down at the floor of the pit. The ground was cracking in several places, and it looked like something was trying to work its way through the soil. She stared at the pale, wriggling shapes for a few seconds. Fingers. Fingers coming up through the ground.
Buffy was still trying to get her sister's attention. "Come on, Dawn! We're supposed to stick together." Her voice took on a threatening tone. "You want me to tell Mom you're up past your bedtime?"
Dawn shook her head vigorously. "You're the one with power, Buffy. I'm gonna go the knowledge route." She reached under the table and retrieved a sword, which, without looking, she lobbed in Buffy's direction. "Here's something for your right hand."
Buffy grabbed the sword by the hilt as it passed by, and swung the blade down in a wide arc, resting the tip on the ground. "Some help you are," she grumbled.
By now, Willow was backed up against the wall of the pit, trying to keep her distance from the grasping arms that were emerging from the floor. "Uh... Buffy? Could you give me some help with these hands?"
"Fine, fine!" Buffy waved the sword over her head in a tiny tantrum. "I guess I have to do everything around here." She began swinging the blade back and forth, shearing off hands and forearms with a motion reminiscent of a golfer wielding a nine-iron. As each limb was severed, it crumbled into dust, but even as it dissolved another was reaching up to take its place.
After perhaps a minute of this, Buffy sighed and drove the point of the blade into the ground. "It's not enough," she said, ignoring the hands clawing the air around her. "I can't fight this. There are always more, and they just keep taking." She looked up at Willow, and her gaze was suddenly piercing, intense. "This is what you're here to see, isn't it? What happened when I reached the end of my rope. When I let myself be afraid for you... Afraid I'd lose you all."
The Slayer broke into a sunny grin. "See? I was getting to it."
Buffy dropped her arms, then lifted them upward and outward. Suddenly chains were shooting out from the ground, wrapping around her wrists, shackling her to the ground. The scenery around them swirled and blurred, resolving itself into a cave similar to the previous one but without the pit, the cozy furnishings, the arms emerging from the ground, the girl and her study partner. Instead, a dark spiral was inscribed on the floor of the cave, and a stone pillar reared up behind the spot where Buffy stood in chains.
"They chained her to the earth." Willow jumped in surprise as a second Buffy came up behind her. The doppelganger walked past Willow towards the pillar where her shackled twin waited, carrying with her a small wooden box. As she reached the center of the spiral, she knelt and placed the box on the ground, then opened it and stepped back to join Willow.
"Buffy?" Willow looked back and forth between the two Slayers, uncertain which one to address. "What is this?"
"We are at the beginning," said the Buffy beside her. "The source of our strength. The well of the Slayer's power."
On the other side of the cave, the chained Buffy chimed in. "This is why we came here."
A dark mist began to emerge from the wooden box in the center of the spiral, its formless substance twining into tendrils which reached out towards the tethered Slayer.
"Okay, the Dead Ringers bit is kinda creeping me out," Willow muttered, but she was fascinated despite herself. She turned, hesitantly, to the Buffy who stood watching beside her. "So this is it, huh? This is what happened when you went back... back to the beginning?"
Buffy, the second Buffy, nodded her agreement. "We came for knowledge, and they could only offer us power."
"But you didn't accept it, did you? You rejected what they offered you." Willow's eyes were drawn back, helplessly, to the far side of the cave where the other Buffy howled and strained against her chains. The black mist--the raw substance of chaos, the body of The First--was seeping into her, flowing in through her eyes, her mouth, her nostrils, her ears.
"I rejected it, yes." The unchained Buffy turned away from the ongoing drama, and began walking towards the tunnel that led out of the cavern. "I snapped their chains, and I broke their staffs, and I told them I already had all the power I needed." She made a sour face. "Man, those old guys really pissed me off."
Willow hesitated, torn, looking back and forth between the Buffy leaving the cave and the one who still struggled, more weakly now, in the grasp of the dark cloud. "Buffy... I can't just leave her. I mean you. I mean..."
"Let her be." Buffy's voice echoed from the walls of the tunnel as she rounded the corner and passed out of view. "She's just a shadow. Something that could have been, but wasn't yet to be."
Hurrying after the departing Buffy, Willow spared one last glance back into the cave. The chained figure was invisible now, entirely swallowed by the mist, and it seemed to her that some new form was slowly taking shape within the roiling black cloud. She shuddered, then ran into the tunnel.
Then the thought sank in. "Wasn't... yet to be?"
"That's right." She heard amusement in the voice, but as Willow trotted through the serpentine passages, Buffy herself seemed to remain tantalizingly out of reach, always just one bend ahead of her. "I was offered power, and I rejected it. But in the end, you can't escape your destiny."
Willow rounded one last corner, and found herself in a vault lit by burning torches. Patches of brickwork showed through the rocky walls of the chamber, and the dirt floor was littered with stone fragments. At the far end of the vault stood a single huge boulder.
Buffy stood before the boulder, admiring the weapon--part axe, part club, part spear--that protruded from its upper surface. The weapon glimmered red and silver in the torchlight.
"In the end, you can't escape your destiny." Buffy's speech was slow, detached, trancelike. "And I didn't escape mine."
...........
The stairwell was full of ghosts. Not just wandering souls like those Xander had encountered in the hallways, like Spike said he was, but full-on ghosts. The air was choked with vapors, gibbering sounds, howling winds. An endless tide of people seemed to be descending the stairs, marching in a jostling crowd. Some were dressed in hospital gowns, some in normal clothes. A few were even naked. He was bizarrely reminded of the crowds at a Star Trek convention he'd attended when he was ten.
"Is this what you wanted?" Spike shouted up at him from his position on the first landing. The marching hordes surged around his motionless form as if he were a boulder in the middle of a swift river. "I was going to spare you doing this a level at a time, but you're the one who wanted to come here. Remember that."
Xander couldn't speak. Could barely think. He stumbled back, pressed against the wall, couldn't be bothered to wonder why it supported him. Terror screeched through him like the sound of nails on a chalkboard.
He'd begun to notice the vampires.
There were several of them in the stairwell from what he could see. Like Spike, they all stood still while others around them moved in a single current, down the stairs. Occasionally, they would reach out and pluck a victim out of the flow, batten on the feebly struggling shade, then let it go to rejoin the shuffling crowd. Most of those victims returned to walking, but not all. Some slowed and stopped, and began hovering near the walls themselves, watching the stream of humanity flow past. Then they, too, began to reach out into that stream with hands curled into claws.
Xander pressed back harder against the wall. He couldn't move. It was even worse when he saw Spike turn and begin to climb the stairs toward him, walking effortlessly against the stream of people. He tried desperately to shut his eyes. Couldn't. Couldn't wake, couldn't sleep, couldn't turn away--
"Xander."
And like snapping awake from a nightmare, the panic attack was over. Spike was standing in front of him, one hand on his shoulder. It took him awhile to process this.
"You can touch me," Xander said faintly. His eyes tracked up the arm, to the face across from him, took in the expression that he couldn't quite identify.
"Vampire here," Spike answered quietly, punctuating this with a jerk of his head toward the crowds behind them. "Seen the others, haven't you? Just a little more tied to this place than you are. Parts of it, anyway."
Xander nodded, let his own hand creep up to grab Spike's opposite shoulder and the they stood there, like two men holding each other up after a long night's drunk.
Vampire here. More tied to this place than you.
He couldn't have expressed how he felt if he wanted to--dazed and weirdly grateful. Questions were still whirling through his head in hopeless confusion, but for now.... It was a relief, in a way he could never express, to know he wasn't part of this place, dead--not the way Spike was. And although he never would have thought he'd find himself thinking it...he was glad not to be alone.
It occurred to him that he could run. He could go back up the stairs, through the door, and back to his hospital room. Sit things out in Intensive Care.
You did your spell, paid your price. Now you're getting what you asked for.
It was true. He'd asked to know. He'd wanted to help.
You can help these girls.
And it was still true that he was scared shitless, but...
He couldn't turn back now.
When Spike let go of his shoulder and gestured for Xander to follow him, this time he went without complaint.
...........
As Lo and Neena had anticipated, the reception that awaited them in the lobby of the Schoenfluss Medical Center was less than warm. No sooner had the two Slayers exited the elevator and rounded the corner into the main reception area, than they were confronted by the lantern-jawed police captain who appeared to have placed himself in charge of the hospital's defenses.
"That's funny. I don't remember sending out for any girl scouts." The captain stared at them for a minute, rubbing his stubbled chin, then hollered across the lobby. "Pinky! Get these kids out of here!"
A huge, muscular man came jogging over at the captain's call, tattooed arms pumping. "Okay, Mac," he rumbled in a low bass. "What's the problem?"
Neena spread her palms in a gesture of appeasement. "Please, sir. We don't intend to cause any trouble."
"That's right," Lo chimed in. "We just wanna watch for a minute so we can, uh, write it up for the school paper." She beamed ingenuously. "It'll be the scoop of the century! This could get us into journalism school!"
The captain rolled his eyes. "Jesus Christ. Okay, Lois Lane, suit yourself. Just keep out of our way, you hear me?" He turned to his towering friend. "All yours, Pinky. If they give you any trouble, stick 'em in a closet or something."
"Okay, little ladies," Pinky said as the captain swaggered off to inspect the front lines, "you just mind the nice man and stay back here out of harm's way." Cutting off Lo's protests with a quick jab in the ribs, Neena assured their babysitter that they'd be no trouble at all, mister, really they wouldn't.
"Hell of a situation," Pinky muttered. "Times like this, you'd think they'd be calling out the National Guard. Figures they'd all be overseas." The girls stared at him quizically.
"Deployed. To Iraq." Pinky seemed perplexed by their continuing blank looks. "You kids do watch the TV news, right? Ah, forget it." He stomped away to harangue a pair of loitering security guards, leaving Neena and Lo to clamber up on top of the reception desk for a better view of the situation. They counted perhaps a dozen people bustling around the lobby, and a similar number arrayed in the courtyard outside, huddled behind their makeshift defensive barricades.
"It appears," Neena ventured, squinting out into the night, "that our visitors are still staying back behind the gates."
Lo grunted her agreement. "Guess those must have been warning shots we heard before." Out in the hospital courtyard, she could see a pair of uniformed policemen perched atop a bulldozer, one of them brandishing a pistol in his upraised hand. Given the sheer number of people gathered outside the gates--at least fifty, more like a hundred--she doubted that this was really going to be much of a deterrent.
Neena paused, listening intently, then turned to Lo with an apologetic shrug. "Sorry, I still can't make it out. It sounds like 'Something something blood, something something darkness, something something.'"
"Whatever. It's all good." Lo slid down from the countertop to the floor. "Better the annoying chanting than the torch-wielding Assault On Precinct Thirteen bit."
Casting one last glance out through the lobby doors, Neena noticed something and frowned. "They're carrying signs of some kind. Are those the same symbols we saw earlier?" Her eyes narrowed, and she watched for a moment as makeshift banners unfurled above the heads of the clamoring crowd. Runic letters gleamed and glistened in the flickering torchlight; the effect was curiously fascinating, and Neena had to make a conscious effort to drag her gaze away.
Suddenly, the chanting stopped. There was a moment of silence, and then a hoarse voice boomed from beyond the hospital gates. "The time has come! Come forth, fortunate ones!" Lo and Neena exchanged glances, and Neena hopped down from the counter of the reception desk as the voice called out again. "Come forth, you lambs of sacrifice! The time has come for you to give your gifts!"
They saw movement in the courtyard outside as one of the policemen crouching behind the barricade of patrol cars rose to his feet, then began tottering woozily toward the gates. Moments later, he was joined by a second one, then by a paramedic who pushed through the lobby doors and began stumbling down the hospital driveway. The three men were staggering like sleepwalkers, and as they walked they began peeling off their clothing--tossing aside jackets, unbuckling belts.
"Oh, hell no!" Pinky was dashing across the lobby towards the doors, hollering at the strays to get their butts back here right now, dammit. Outside, the other policemen were tackling the wanderers, pinning them to the tarmac. As the sleepwalkers were grappled, they came violently awake, clawing and spitting at their rescuers. A burly paramedic--Portnoy, the one they'd spoken to earlier--went jogging down the driveway to deliver a round of sedatives.
A cry of disapproval came from the mob outside the gates, dissolving into an agitated babble. Neena and Lo, who had taken advantage of the disruption to sneak up to the front of the lobby, saw the crowd stirring and shifting, moving aside to clear the way for something or someone...
There was a flash of motion, and a figure leapt up out of the crowd, through the air, landing atop the hospital gates with inhuman agility. The figure straightened up and took in the lay of the land--the courtyard, the barricade of patrol cars, the sentries atop the bulldozer, the anxious faces pressed against the glass of the lobby doors--and gave a bark of harsh laughter.
The newcomer was a young woman--a tall one, at least six feet--clad in jeans, boots, a battered army-surplus jacket. In one hand she held a length of pipe, brandishing it like a spear. She shook her head with a flurry of dreadlocks, and then she spoke again.
"Behold," the woman cried, "the vanity of men! See how they cower inside their citadel of learning! Their false temple to a false god!" She turned to address the mob behind her, and her ragged army responded with raised fists, torches, clubs. "Behold the heretics, the ungrateful ones! They take the bounty of the earth and give nothing back! They spill blood, not to nourish the Great Mother, but to feed their own greed and stubborn pride!"
The crowd began to chant again. Something something blood, Neena thought. Something something darkness. Beside her, Lo was tensing in anticipation of danger, of sudden violence.
A voice called out from the middle of the crowd. "Sanguine! Priestess of the Great Mother!" The chanting subsided for a moment, and the speaker continued. "Is it time? Is it time to punish the faithless ones? Tell us!" The mob roared its approval. Punish them, Sanguine! Punish them!
Lo and Neena were outside now--weaving their way around the metal posts that supported the canopy outside the lobby doors, creeping past the police cars, always keeping a wary eye on the figure perched atop the hospital gates.
"You have denied the Great Mother the blood which is her due!" The tall woman returned her attention to the hospital and its defenders. "The time has come to return the gifts she has given you! To return to the darkness!"
"That's it." In the courtyard below, one of the policemen shouldered his rifle, steadying it on the hood of a patrol car. "I'm taking this crazy bitch out."
As the policeman's finger tightened on the trigger, the rifle was suddenly snatched from his hands. He turned around just in time to see his weapon delicately folded in half by the hands of a lanky, black-clad teenage girl.
"My apologies, sir." Neena smiled apologetically as Lo finished twisting the rifle barrel into a crude knot. "This woman is our responsibility. You see... she is one of us."
They heard a thud from further down the driveway. The tall woman--Sanguine the Vampire Slayer, Priestess of the Great Mother--had leapt from the gates and landed in the hospital courtyard. She took a step back, and placed her hand on the iron gates.
"The time has come! Let us sanctify this place in the way of our ancestors!" Sanguine pulled her hand back and then, with superhuman speed and power, drove it straight into the lock that held the gates shut. The iron buckled and folded, and the gates parted with a hideous groan. "In the name of the Great Mother, let the blood FLOW!"
Previous parts here
ACT TWELVE: AT THE GATES
"This," Neena cried, "is just impossible!" Her fingers clenched in frustration, and she started pulling the knotted threads apart once again. "Bet makes it look so easy. I must be doing something wrong."
"Is it just me," Lo asked, "or is that chanting getting louder?" She looked over at Neena, who was standing with her back to the window in the otherwise empty hallway outside Xander's room.
"I believe it is." Neena gave up on her Cat's Cradle and squinted through the glass, shading her eyes so that she could make out the details of the dark landscape beyond. "It seems we can anticipate visitors." Tiny pinpricks of light were winding their way through the blacked-out streets, like luminous millipedes inching towards the hospital. The sound was still very faint, but they could hear distant voices shouting in unison.
Sliding down the wall, Lo collapsed into a cross-legged pose on the floor. "Wonder what they're saying," she mused. "What do we want? Brains! When do we want 'em? Brains!"
Neena turned from the window with a frown. "That's not funny, Lolita... Sorry, Lo."
"Thank you, Miss Kulkarni." Lo raised a hand to her face and began absently chewing on a couple of knuckles. "They're coming this way, aren't they?"
"Yes. From what the staff were saying, these people have been gathering outside the hospital for the last few nights, but have yet to take direct action."
Lo sighed. "I betcha their luck's gonna change now that we're here." She paused for a minute, and then started in alarm. "Oh shit. Are those gunshots?"
The two girls exchanged anxious glances. As they listened, they heard a couple more sporadic bangs, apparently coming from just outside the hospital building.
After a minute, Lo spoke. "I vote we go see what's happening."
Neena pondered, fiddling nervously with her loops of tangled thread. "I don't know. Our priority is to protect Mr. Harris..."
"And we'll have a fine time doing that once this place is overrun by torch-wielding maniacs, won't we? C'mon, Neena. The junior misses can handle things up here." Lo stood up, and stretched with a heroic yawn.
"Very well." Neena stuck her head through the doorway of the room and let Bet and Graciela know they were going for a quick stroll, pretending not to notice that she'd just startled Graciela out of a light doze. Then she hastened after Lo, who was already striding off towards the elevator.
"I can't help thinking," Neena said as she fell in beside her comrade, "that we ought to consult with Kennedy or Willow before taking action."
Lo snorted. "Sorry, captain, but they're strictly in Do Not Disturb mode. It would be one thing if they were just catnapping or..." and she lifted her fingers in sarcastic air quotes, "'gettin' frisky.' But since it's past midnight, they've probably started with the spell-casting already. And I really don't think we should go messing with that." She recalled the pain of Willow's energy blasts, and reflexively winced.
"Ah well." Neena thumbed the down button next to the elevator doors. "At least we'll find out all what the chanting is about."
...........
Xander wandered the hospital alone for quite some time. Outside the relative quiet of Intensive Care, the halls appeared to be crowded with gurneys, loud with sobs and screams. Spatters of blood were visible on the floor, smears of it on the walls. And he'd seen things--people. Others like himself who could walk ghostlike in and out of objects. They seemed to be everywhere.
Spirits, he thought. Like me. People on the brink of death. He refused to think of them as ghosts, even though that was definitely what they looked like--they hovered around every corner like something out of The Sixth Sense, lost and pale and confused. They shuffled back and forth slowly, their mouths moving as if to speak, but no sounds came out. He'd gathered up his nerve at one point to try to talk to a couple of them. There'd been no sign that they had even heard.
And although the hospital surely wasn't that big, it seemed like hours had passed before he ran across Spike again. The vampire was standing motionless in front of an elevator, staring at the closed doors as if he expected them to speak. Several restless spirits were milling around him, like moths drawn to a light bulb.
Xander hesitated for a moment, undecided, then padded over to join the crowd. The wanderers parted to let him through, without otherwise seeming to realize that he was there.
"So, this is the hot hangout spot, huh?" he asked, trying to sound casual. His tour of the sixth floor had bothered him much more than he cared to let on, and the shuffling shades were hardly helping. When the going gets freaky, any company's better than nothing. Even the evil dead undead.
Spike gave no response.
"It's funny, you know. You showing up," he tried again. Attempted to clear his throat, realized he couldn't. Ghost. Right. "I mean, feels like we've done this whole quest thing before." C'mon, Spike. Talk to me.
There was a long pause.
"Is that right," Spike said dryly.
Finally! "Yeah, I mean--well, that spirit guide I was talking about? He--"
"Look," Spike turned to him finally, his face a mask of strained patience. "I didn't ask to do this. Really don't like you. Really don't want to talk to you. Wouldn't be here at all if I had a choice."
"Oh." Well, okay, no shock there. But talk about a conversation stopper. He thought for a moment. "So why are you here then?"
"Because the gatekeeper wants you to see the works, didn't you hear what I said? You get a tour of the underworld so you can take back knowledge to the land of the living. Dante must be spinning in his grave."
"Dante? What, like the Nine Circles of Hell?"
Spike's expression was one of pure astonishment. "Where in God's name did you hear that?"
"X-Men Annual 4."
Spike blinked, returned to door-staring without comment.
"Why does this gatekeeper want to show me anything?" Xander persisted. Anything to keep the conversation going, anything to not think about the hell portion of that thought. Tour of hell. I am so not ready for a tour of hell. "I mean, I did that spell over a week ago. Did the vision quest thing, got the T-shirt... Thought that was it. I mean, that we were done."
"Nothing's ever done, don't you know that yet?" Spike grimaced, as if pained. "You did your spell, paid your price. Now you're getting what you asked for."
It took a moment for Xander to figure it out. "So the spirit guide, that mystical whatever-it-was that looked like you--that was the gatekeeper? "
"Dunno about what he looked like. Didn't get much of a look at him myself. Likes to keep the lights low, he does."
Elusive and mysterious, check. That fits. Xander pondered his words further. "What did you mean about paying a price?"
"Always a price with magic. The universe doesn't do something for nothing."
"It was just a spell. The usual chanting and--"
"Oh, right," Spike cut him off. "Words don't mean a damn thing, do they? Just names and nonsense."
Xander held in his anger with some difficulty. Like you'd know anything about it. "I'm just saying. There was no price."
"None that you knew to ask about."
Xander fell silent then. Because it was true that it hadn't occured to him to think about the details of the ritual, and the Wicca woman hadn't given him any explanations. The spell had been in another language. He'd had no idea what he'd been saying, what he might have agreed to. Okay, now's a good time to start wigging. It's starting to sound like I'm under some sort of contract. Disturbed, he struggled to think of a subject change.
"Waiting for something?" Xander finally asked.
Spike snorted. He raised a hand, passed it through the controls. "Waiting for someone to come along and use the lift, you twit."
"Why not just walk through the wall?"
"And then what? Climb the ladder?" He lifted his hands, dropped them. "Good luck with that."
"Why not? You're standing on the floor. And can't ghosts--I dunno, fly?"
A wince. "You're a wandering soul, Harris, not Peter bloody Pan."
The two stood side by side for a moment.
"So why not take the stairs?"
Spike made an irriated sound. "Fine," he grated, then turned and stomped off without waiting toward a door marked STAIRS. Passed through the closed panel and disappeared.
Xander stared in surprise for a moment, then shrugged and followed.
And stepped through the door into madness.
...........
Willow splashed through the tunnels, ankle-deep in water and struggling to keep up with her companion's rapid strides. "Buffy?" She stumbled, and clutched at the mossy rock of the tunnel wall for support. "Wait up. It's getting pretty dark in here."
Buffy came to a halt. Still keeping her back to Willow, she looked up at the ceiling, where metal pipes ran like veins along the winding length of the tunnel. Fluid leaked from the pipes in steady rivulets, spilling down into the waters that covered the floor of the passageway.
"I could have sworn I paid to have this fixed," Buffy muttered. She turned, looking back at Willow. "I'm sorry, did you say something?"
"I said," Willow replied, stepping unsteadily through the water, "it's getting dark in here. Not so good for the seeing." She frowned. "What are we doing down here, anyway?"
"I always end up down here, Will." Buffy's face was unreadable in the fading light. "But you never come with me, do you?" She began walking back along the tunnel toward Willow. "Angel, Spike... Riley, Dawn... they've all been down here with me. And Xander... I swear, you can't keep that boy away!"
"It's not healthy," Willow protested, shrinking back a little. "I don't think you should stay down here, either. You could catch something."
Buffy chuckled. "I already have. Comes with the job." She extended her hand, its fingers glistening with something dark and wet. "Here. This will help you see."
Something warm and liquid caressed Willow's face, brushing across her eyelids. A moment later, she felt a flare of heat, and for a second her vision was overwhelmed by a flood of brightness. She yelped and stumbled backward, rubbing her eyes, and little by little her sight returned.
"Open your eyes," Buffy said, "and see what is hidden in darkness."
Blinking, Willow looked about her, and discovered that the lighting had indeed improved dramatically. Not only that, but the scene had changed again; instead of a cramped tunnel, a subterranean cavern arched above their heads, tangled roots protruding through its walls. The two of them were now standing in what appeared to be an earthern pit sunken into the cavern's floor, perhaps five feet deep. As she took in the scene, Willow was surprised to see that the cave was furnished with bookshelves, cabinets, tables, chairs--even a television set. How cozy, she thought. You could almost live down here.
"Hey, Dawnie," Buffy yelled. "A little help here?"
Willow whirled about in surprise, and saw Dawn seated at a folding card table, across from a fleshy, wrinkled creature who looked as if he'd been left out too long in the sun--Clem, she remembered, that was his name. They appeared intent on something on the tabletop, but from her vantage point at the bottom of the pit she couldn't tell what it was.
"Sorry, Buffy," Dawn called back, eyes still fixed on the table. "Clem's helping me with my lessons. I have to do a report on the Battle of Waterloo." She raised her hand and moved something on the tabletop.
The wrinkled creature yelped in dismay. "You sank my battleship!"
Willow heard a creaking noise, and looked down at the floor of the pit. The ground was cracking in several places, and it looked like something was trying to work its way through the soil. She stared at the pale, wriggling shapes for a few seconds. Fingers. Fingers coming up through the ground.
Buffy was still trying to get her sister's attention. "Come on, Dawn! We're supposed to stick together." Her voice took on a threatening tone. "You want me to tell Mom you're up past your bedtime?"
Dawn shook her head vigorously. "You're the one with power, Buffy. I'm gonna go the knowledge route." She reached under the table and retrieved a sword, which, without looking, she lobbed in Buffy's direction. "Here's something for your right hand."
Buffy grabbed the sword by the hilt as it passed by, and swung the blade down in a wide arc, resting the tip on the ground. "Some help you are," she grumbled.
By now, Willow was backed up against the wall of the pit, trying to keep her distance from the grasping arms that were emerging from the floor. "Uh... Buffy? Could you give me some help with these hands?"
"Fine, fine!" Buffy waved the sword over her head in a tiny tantrum. "I guess I have to do everything around here." She began swinging the blade back and forth, shearing off hands and forearms with a motion reminiscent of a golfer wielding a nine-iron. As each limb was severed, it crumbled into dust, but even as it dissolved another was reaching up to take its place.
After perhaps a minute of this, Buffy sighed and drove the point of the blade into the ground. "It's not enough," she said, ignoring the hands clawing the air around her. "I can't fight this. There are always more, and they just keep taking." She looked up at Willow, and her gaze was suddenly piercing, intense. "This is what you're here to see, isn't it? What happened when I reached the end of my rope. When I let myself be afraid for you... Afraid I'd lose you all."
The Slayer broke into a sunny grin. "See? I was getting to it."
Buffy dropped her arms, then lifted them upward and outward. Suddenly chains were shooting out from the ground, wrapping around her wrists, shackling her to the ground. The scenery around them swirled and blurred, resolving itself into a cave similar to the previous one but without the pit, the cozy furnishings, the arms emerging from the ground, the girl and her study partner. Instead, a dark spiral was inscribed on the floor of the cave, and a stone pillar reared up behind the spot where Buffy stood in chains.
"They chained her to the earth." Willow jumped in surprise as a second Buffy came up behind her. The doppelganger walked past Willow towards the pillar where her shackled twin waited, carrying with her a small wooden box. As she reached the center of the spiral, she knelt and placed the box on the ground, then opened it and stepped back to join Willow.
"Buffy?" Willow looked back and forth between the two Slayers, uncertain which one to address. "What is this?"
"We are at the beginning," said the Buffy beside her. "The source of our strength. The well of the Slayer's power."
On the other side of the cave, the chained Buffy chimed in. "This is why we came here."
A dark mist began to emerge from the wooden box in the center of the spiral, its formless substance twining into tendrils which reached out towards the tethered Slayer.
"Okay, the Dead Ringers bit is kinda creeping me out," Willow muttered, but she was fascinated despite herself. She turned, hesitantly, to the Buffy who stood watching beside her. "So this is it, huh? This is what happened when you went back... back to the beginning?"
Buffy, the second Buffy, nodded her agreement. "We came for knowledge, and they could only offer us power."
"But you didn't accept it, did you? You rejected what they offered you." Willow's eyes were drawn back, helplessly, to the far side of the cave where the other Buffy howled and strained against her chains. The black mist--the raw substance of chaos, the body of The First--was seeping into her, flowing in through her eyes, her mouth, her nostrils, her ears.
"I rejected it, yes." The unchained Buffy turned away from the ongoing drama, and began walking towards the tunnel that led out of the cavern. "I snapped their chains, and I broke their staffs, and I told them I already had all the power I needed." She made a sour face. "Man, those old guys really pissed me off."
Willow hesitated, torn, looking back and forth between the Buffy leaving the cave and the one who still struggled, more weakly now, in the grasp of the dark cloud. "Buffy... I can't just leave her. I mean you. I mean..."
"Let her be." Buffy's voice echoed from the walls of the tunnel as she rounded the corner and passed out of view. "She's just a shadow. Something that could have been, but wasn't yet to be."
Hurrying after the departing Buffy, Willow spared one last glance back into the cave. The chained figure was invisible now, entirely swallowed by the mist, and it seemed to her that some new form was slowly taking shape within the roiling black cloud. She shuddered, then ran into the tunnel.
Then the thought sank in. "Wasn't... yet to be?"
"That's right." She heard amusement in the voice, but as Willow trotted through the serpentine passages, Buffy herself seemed to remain tantalizingly out of reach, always just one bend ahead of her. "I was offered power, and I rejected it. But in the end, you can't escape your destiny."
Willow rounded one last corner, and found herself in a vault lit by burning torches. Patches of brickwork showed through the rocky walls of the chamber, and the dirt floor was littered with stone fragments. At the far end of the vault stood a single huge boulder.
Buffy stood before the boulder, admiring the weapon--part axe, part club, part spear--that protruded from its upper surface. The weapon glimmered red and silver in the torchlight.
"In the end, you can't escape your destiny." Buffy's speech was slow, detached, trancelike. "And I didn't escape mine."
...........
The stairwell was full of ghosts. Not just wandering souls like those Xander had encountered in the hallways, like Spike said he was, but full-on ghosts. The air was choked with vapors, gibbering sounds, howling winds. An endless tide of people seemed to be descending the stairs, marching in a jostling crowd. Some were dressed in hospital gowns, some in normal clothes. A few were even naked. He was bizarrely reminded of the crowds at a Star Trek convention he'd attended when he was ten.
"Is this what you wanted?" Spike shouted up at him from his position on the first landing. The marching hordes surged around his motionless form as if he were a boulder in the middle of a swift river. "I was going to spare you doing this a level at a time, but you're the one who wanted to come here. Remember that."
Xander couldn't speak. Could barely think. He stumbled back, pressed against the wall, couldn't be bothered to wonder why it supported him. Terror screeched through him like the sound of nails on a chalkboard.
He'd begun to notice the vampires.
There were several of them in the stairwell from what he could see. Like Spike, they all stood still while others around them moved in a single current, down the stairs. Occasionally, they would reach out and pluck a victim out of the flow, batten on the feebly struggling shade, then let it go to rejoin the shuffling crowd. Most of those victims returned to walking, but not all. Some slowed and stopped, and began hovering near the walls themselves, watching the stream of humanity flow past. Then they, too, began to reach out into that stream with hands curled into claws.
Xander pressed back harder against the wall. He couldn't move. It was even worse when he saw Spike turn and begin to climb the stairs toward him, walking effortlessly against the stream of people. He tried desperately to shut his eyes. Couldn't. Couldn't wake, couldn't sleep, couldn't turn away--
"Xander."
And like snapping awake from a nightmare, the panic attack was over. Spike was standing in front of him, one hand on his shoulder. It took him awhile to process this.
"You can touch me," Xander said faintly. His eyes tracked up the arm, to the face across from him, took in the expression that he couldn't quite identify.
"Vampire here," Spike answered quietly, punctuating this with a jerk of his head toward the crowds behind them. "Seen the others, haven't you? Just a little more tied to this place than you are. Parts of it, anyway."
Xander nodded, let his own hand creep up to grab Spike's opposite shoulder and the they stood there, like two men holding each other up after a long night's drunk.
Vampire here. More tied to this place than you.
He couldn't have expressed how he felt if he wanted to--dazed and weirdly grateful. Questions were still whirling through his head in hopeless confusion, but for now.... It was a relief, in a way he could never express, to know he wasn't part of this place, dead--not the way Spike was. And although he never would have thought he'd find himself thinking it...he was glad not to be alone.
It occurred to him that he could run. He could go back up the stairs, through the door, and back to his hospital room. Sit things out in Intensive Care.
You did your spell, paid your price. Now you're getting what you asked for.
It was true. He'd asked to know. He'd wanted to help.
You can help these girls.
And it was still true that he was scared shitless, but...
He couldn't turn back now.
When Spike let go of his shoulder and gestured for Xander to follow him, this time he went without complaint.
...........
As Lo and Neena had anticipated, the reception that awaited them in the lobby of the Schoenfluss Medical Center was less than warm. No sooner had the two Slayers exited the elevator and rounded the corner into the main reception area, than they were confronted by the lantern-jawed police captain who appeared to have placed himself in charge of the hospital's defenses.
"That's funny. I don't remember sending out for any girl scouts." The captain stared at them for a minute, rubbing his stubbled chin, then hollered across the lobby. "Pinky! Get these kids out of here!"
A huge, muscular man came jogging over at the captain's call, tattooed arms pumping. "Okay, Mac," he rumbled in a low bass. "What's the problem?"
Neena spread her palms in a gesture of appeasement. "Please, sir. We don't intend to cause any trouble."
"That's right," Lo chimed in. "We just wanna watch for a minute so we can, uh, write it up for the school paper." She beamed ingenuously. "It'll be the scoop of the century! This could get us into journalism school!"
The captain rolled his eyes. "Jesus Christ. Okay, Lois Lane, suit yourself. Just keep out of our way, you hear me?" He turned to his towering friend. "All yours, Pinky. If they give you any trouble, stick 'em in a closet or something."
"Okay, little ladies," Pinky said as the captain swaggered off to inspect the front lines, "you just mind the nice man and stay back here out of harm's way." Cutting off Lo's protests with a quick jab in the ribs, Neena assured their babysitter that they'd be no trouble at all, mister, really they wouldn't.
"Hell of a situation," Pinky muttered. "Times like this, you'd think they'd be calling out the National Guard. Figures they'd all be overseas." The girls stared at him quizically.
"Deployed. To Iraq." Pinky seemed perplexed by their continuing blank looks. "You kids do watch the TV news, right? Ah, forget it." He stomped away to harangue a pair of loitering security guards, leaving Neena and Lo to clamber up on top of the reception desk for a better view of the situation. They counted perhaps a dozen people bustling around the lobby, and a similar number arrayed in the courtyard outside, huddled behind their makeshift defensive barricades.
"It appears," Neena ventured, squinting out into the night, "that our visitors are still staying back behind the gates."
Lo grunted her agreement. "Guess those must have been warning shots we heard before." Out in the hospital courtyard, she could see a pair of uniformed policemen perched atop a bulldozer, one of them brandishing a pistol in his upraised hand. Given the sheer number of people gathered outside the gates--at least fifty, more like a hundred--she doubted that this was really going to be much of a deterrent.
Neena paused, listening intently, then turned to Lo with an apologetic shrug. "Sorry, I still can't make it out. It sounds like 'Something something blood, something something darkness, something something.'"
"Whatever. It's all good." Lo slid down from the countertop to the floor. "Better the annoying chanting than the torch-wielding Assault On Precinct Thirteen bit."
Casting one last glance out through the lobby doors, Neena noticed something and frowned. "They're carrying signs of some kind. Are those the same symbols we saw earlier?" Her eyes narrowed, and she watched for a moment as makeshift banners unfurled above the heads of the clamoring crowd. Runic letters gleamed and glistened in the flickering torchlight; the effect was curiously fascinating, and Neena had to make a conscious effort to drag her gaze away.
Suddenly, the chanting stopped. There was a moment of silence, and then a hoarse voice boomed from beyond the hospital gates. "The time has come! Come forth, fortunate ones!" Lo and Neena exchanged glances, and Neena hopped down from the counter of the reception desk as the voice called out again. "Come forth, you lambs of sacrifice! The time has come for you to give your gifts!"
They saw movement in the courtyard outside as one of the policemen crouching behind the barricade of patrol cars rose to his feet, then began tottering woozily toward the gates. Moments later, he was joined by a second one, then by a paramedic who pushed through the lobby doors and began stumbling down the hospital driveway. The three men were staggering like sleepwalkers, and as they walked they began peeling off their clothing--tossing aside jackets, unbuckling belts.
"Oh, hell no!" Pinky was dashing across the lobby towards the doors, hollering at the strays to get their butts back here right now, dammit. Outside, the other policemen were tackling the wanderers, pinning them to the tarmac. As the sleepwalkers were grappled, they came violently awake, clawing and spitting at their rescuers. A burly paramedic--Portnoy, the one they'd spoken to earlier--went jogging down the driveway to deliver a round of sedatives.
A cry of disapproval came from the mob outside the gates, dissolving into an agitated babble. Neena and Lo, who had taken advantage of the disruption to sneak up to the front of the lobby, saw the crowd stirring and shifting, moving aside to clear the way for something or someone...
There was a flash of motion, and a figure leapt up out of the crowd, through the air, landing atop the hospital gates with inhuman agility. The figure straightened up and took in the lay of the land--the courtyard, the barricade of patrol cars, the sentries atop the bulldozer, the anxious faces pressed against the glass of the lobby doors--and gave a bark of harsh laughter.
The newcomer was a young woman--a tall one, at least six feet--clad in jeans, boots, a battered army-surplus jacket. In one hand she held a length of pipe, brandishing it like a spear. She shook her head with a flurry of dreadlocks, and then she spoke again.
"Behold," the woman cried, "the vanity of men! See how they cower inside their citadel of learning! Their false temple to a false god!" She turned to address the mob behind her, and her ragged army responded with raised fists, torches, clubs. "Behold the heretics, the ungrateful ones! They take the bounty of the earth and give nothing back! They spill blood, not to nourish the Great Mother, but to feed their own greed and stubborn pride!"
The crowd began to chant again. Something something blood, Neena thought. Something something darkness. Beside her, Lo was tensing in anticipation of danger, of sudden violence.
A voice called out from the middle of the crowd. "Sanguine! Priestess of the Great Mother!" The chanting subsided for a moment, and the speaker continued. "Is it time? Is it time to punish the faithless ones? Tell us!" The mob roared its approval. Punish them, Sanguine! Punish them!
Lo and Neena were outside now--weaving their way around the metal posts that supported the canopy outside the lobby doors, creeping past the police cars, always keeping a wary eye on the figure perched atop the hospital gates.
"You have denied the Great Mother the blood which is her due!" The tall woman returned her attention to the hospital and its defenders. "The time has come to return the gifts she has given you! To return to the darkness!"
"That's it." In the courtyard below, one of the policemen shouldered his rifle, steadying it on the hood of a patrol car. "I'm taking this crazy bitch out."
As the policeman's finger tightened on the trigger, the rifle was suddenly snatched from his hands. He turned around just in time to see his weapon delicately folded in half by the hands of a lanky, black-clad teenage girl.
"My apologies, sir." Neena smiled apologetically as Lo finished twisting the rifle barrel into a crude knot. "This woman is our responsibility. You see... she is one of us."
They heard a thud from further down the driveway. The tall woman--Sanguine the Vampire Slayer, Priestess of the Great Mother--had leapt from the gates and landed in the hospital courtyard. She took a step back, and placed her hand on the iron gates.
"The time has come! Let us sanctify this place in the way of our ancestors!" Sanguine pulled her hand back and then, with superhuman speed and power, drove it straight into the lock that held the gates shut. The iron buckled and folded, and the gates parted with a hideous groan. "In the name of the Great Mother, let the blood FLOW!"
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Okay, I'm completely swept away, but still processing. I'll have to
give it a couple more reads before commenting.
This is a GOOD thing, for me: I adore complex fic.
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And on an unrelated note, I've been bitten this wrestling plot bunny that I may have to sit down and do something about. (Spike and Harmony infiltate a demon wrestling ring! Dood!) And I can't believe I'd actually forgotten that wrestling had actually come up in AtS before, with the Luchadores in "The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco.' D'oh!
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words fail me. Hee.
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Also, sort of, in The Ring
Re: Long as hell and probably turgid to boot - Part 3 actually
"You can touch me," Xander said faintly. His eyes tracked up the arm, to the face across from him, took in the expression that he couldn't quite identify.
I read WAY too much slutfic. ((facepalm))
(looks innocent).... (gives up looking innocent) Okay. I admit it. I giggled writing "you can touch me." Thought about changing it. Decided not to. I'm bad.
Yay ActionXander! I cannot express how happy I am you give him stuff to DO. And I like his protecting the girls. His girls.
ActionXander is getting a handle on manly responsiblity these days, isn't he? But he's still got a few lessons to learn there, oh yes....
Re: Long as hell and probably turgid to boot - Part 3 actually
Toys had a response he was going to write on this, but he was too chicken, so I'll write it.
Xander and Spike: Going down.
Buffy and Willow: Going down. Only not as far.
Junior Slayers: Running around in circles, mostly.
Which translates to, more hospital/underworld stuff (oh yes, my precious, more of that indeed), more dreamy dream stuff, and big showdown sequence. /hints.
Re: Long as hell and probably turgid to boot - Part 3 actually
It's actually Xander who's responsible for the Dante homage - that's why he has a poet as his tour guide. The Junior Slayers are dealing with the more tangible problem of, well, a hundred maniacs.
Did I tell you you're actually making Buffy sympathetic?
And our retconning isn't done yet...
Re: Long as hell and probably turgid to boot - Part 3 actually
I suppose it's actually kind of like the Bacchae in reverse - a hundred crazies following one wicked woman. :-)
Re: Long as hell and probably turgid to boot - Part 3 actually
Oh, I think she's making herself understood just fine, thanks. :-)
Meanwhile, I've almost finished with my material for the next two(!) chapters; the Willow and Buffy mindwalk is done, so I just need to wrap up the hospital siege. If you have any requests for the Sanguine character, this would be a good time for 'em...
Re: Long as hell and probably turgid to boot - Part 3 actually
(But c'mon, do you really think we're going to gouge out Xander's remaining peeper? Beat him, stab him, give him brain trauma, sure... But that would just be mean!)
Re: Long as hell and probably turgid to boot - Part 3 actually
Buffy and Willow: Going down. Only not as far.
I think Toys lives to make us think smutty thoughts
Re: Long as hell and probably turgid to boot - Part 3 actually
No, y'all just have dirty, dirty minds!
When this is all over, ask the Hook to tell you about the "smell of her hair" bit that ended up on the cutting-room floor...
Re: Long as hell and probably turgid to boot - Part 3 actually
Re: Long as hell and probably turgid to boot - Part 1
Whew! Well, I think you just worked off your debt to society with this batch.
I'll leave it to my partner-in-crime to comment on the Xander-and-Spike show, while I kibitz about my own plot threads. Funny how she's handling the Boys' Adventure while I'm doing all the Girl Power stuff...
((In full hypocritical violation of the-author-should-be-able-to-work-unmolested-by-fans-with-favorite-characters commandment)) No hurting my girls.
I'm sorry, but for reasons of narrative suspense, I can't comment on this. Heh.
Why is it that the two of you are perfectly nice people and yet you make me FEAR for everyone I like in the story?
Golly gee, that's a puzzler. Maybe we're not as nice as you think we are. :-)
And maybe it's just the recent Angel ep but reminds me some of Lindsey's subterranean homesick hell dimension suburban prison....
I guess I was thinking more of Spike's cozy crypt-slash-hobbit hole, but most of these dream scenes are meant to echo multiple elements from the show, so maybe so. At any rate, the subterranean stuff is such a constant theme in both shows that it all kind of blurs together after a while...
This is the worst kinda nitpickery, but unless she's aware of what came out of her mouth and winces at the unintentional pun, the peanut gallery like Your Reader in the audience is going to yell, "She's got em to spare!" Total nitpicky tiny detail. But that's why you love me.
Indeed it is. I'd considered having Willow throw in a weak "no pun intended" there, but I figured that you're prone to make all kinds of half-assed double entendres when you're under the sway of dream logic. Perhaps "some help with these hands" would work better...
Aaaaagh! Cool, like "Weight of the World." I always liked that effect.
Double the Buffy, double the creepiness!
Poor Buffy. (Sympathy for post-S6 Buffy -- amazing!)
No kidding. Sometimes I think we're biting off more than we can chew here...
I read WAY too much slutfic.
Oh, I don't think you and the Hook have anything in common there. :-)
I like the crosscutting a lot better -- it's frustrating not being able to catch up on all the stories at once, but good frustrating, if you know what I mean. I also like the different levels of tone and suspense. Maybe you guys've just found your rhythm with it, or I'm better accustomed to it.
I think it's probably the former. This is the first time we've ever done this kind of Exquisite Corpse-style collaborative writing, and it's taking us a little while to get the hang of the pacing. Seems to be going more smoothly now...
HA! Love Lo putting on the Lois Lane act. I was a little skeptical the police would just let them stick around, but maybe if it's a nightly occurrence they've gotten a little more relaxed about security stuff.
And besides, in the end, all must bow to the dictates of the Almighty Plot! My rationalization is that after Lo barfed up that school-paper line, the cops realized she was going to talk circles around them no matter what, and that they shouldn't waste their time trying to outwit her.
Ha, I SO saw that coming -- not that it was predictable or anything, I'm just so useless when it comes to seeing plot twists it satisfied me to suss out that one.
Glad we could be of service!
Damn, this is good. Three-four storylines going on at once, fast-paced, well-written....can't you guys write any faster?
Well, all this feedback is certainly a good motivator! If all goes well, we may have another chapter ready within the next couple days...
Re: Hi my name is Moira and I am an insomniac. Hi Moira
I hear literary transvestism is tres hot right now.
I thought of that too, actually, I think the Lindsey image is just fresher.
Gotcha. It occurs to me that, if the Whedonverse equates Ugly Truths with subterranean realms like Lindsey's basement, then characters like Buffy who spend most of their time underground are essentially Keeping It Real. (That was kind of what I was getting at with Buffy's digs about how it's never Willow who ends up in the tunnels and basements.) Angel's ascension to the upper floors of the Wolfram & Hart offices, similarly, would symbolize how he's selling out and abandoning his sewer roots.
Heh, that sound Willowy.
Okay, let's just go in and fix that then...
Kind of a "Yeah yeah, whatever girlie, don't bug us" moment.
Exactly. Because, you know, torch-wielding mob.
((whimper whimper)) Need to know what happens....don't I get one little hint? ((begs shamelessly))
Personally, I'd love to. But the Hook, she is a harsh mistress, as deadly as she is beautiful. Those who dispense unauthorized spoilers are sure to taste her cold steel.
We'll just have to write fasterfasterfaster...
Re: Hi my name is Moira and I am an insomniac. Hi Moira
Hey, c'est cool! ((now wants ep analysis along with the fic))
When we're all done with this thing, I guess we'll have to start working on the liner notes. Kinda appropriate, since this story started out as something of a Trojan Horse for us to promote our conspiracy theories about the last season of Buffy.
It was also amusing that the big manly cops were also actually about to get their asses handed to them by the little girlies, and in true keeping with the Buffiverse guns-don't-help oh my what she did to that nice man's shotgun....
I figure that, as rotten a role model as Buffy may have been, she was still the only example of a Slayer the girls had, and so they'd inevitably pick up a lot of her attitudes and tactics. The rifle-bending stunt was definitely a page from the Summers playbook...
What's the fuel? Chocolate? Caffeine? Red Bull? Jolt? Trucker speed?
Ooh, trucker speed! But really, your feedback is our spiritual crank.
Re: Long as hell and probably turgid to boot - Part 1
These are the nummy treats that make life worth living. : )
Damn, this is what Kingdom Hospital should've been like! And why I have to run out of the room during parts of Jacob's Ladder! Hospitals are already horror shows.
So I didn't overdo on the Kingdom Hospital homage? Good to know. It's so ironic - it was only after that series really started to suck that Toys decided we needed a haunted hospital sequence.
Yay! Yay to see Spike again. I got mad at Xander when he wouldn't follow the Peroxided Captain.
Well, I figured - there's still baggage there. These two are never going to get along perfectly even though (cross my heart) I feel that the essential truth of Xander and Spike is that in another universe, they could have been friends. Like that Trek episode with Kirk and the Romulan captain. (Jeezus Christ, I'm such a geek...)
Nice image with the spirits, too -- stands to reason they'd be drawn to vampires, who eat blood and are immortal but no longer alive. Elevator, hee.
I actually revised that scene just today. Originally, I had them taking the elevator and I didn't really like how it was working... and then I realized, I had Spike giving this whole ornery rant about how they shouldn't take the stairs, and it dawned on me... uh, I should just show why they shouldn't take the stairs. So the wandering ghosts, all that... just came natural then. Heh heh heh...
Re: the "talk to me" line. Hm. I wanted to walk a line with Xander on how friendly he comes off, since he also left off last chapter with the hostiliy and the big accusations.. things may change later, but that was the idea, of him thinking it, not saying it.
And yeah, I'd been waiting to use that X-Men punchline (small voice) because, uh, that's probably where I first learned about Dante from.... (ducks)
If he's lucky there won't be any singing and dancing and burning and dying. You'd think he'd've thought about this. But he's Xander....
This shall be addressed.
TBC
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If I'm understanding right, Xander is Dante, Spike is Virgil, who would be Beatrice? ;)
Not so much attached to the Junior Slayers. But if you have to kill someone...*chants* Kennedy! Kennedy!
Good chapter, full of very ominious and creepy creepy things! Eeep!
*hugs you guys*
This is probably the best fic I've read to date. I like reading the slash and the fluffy romance ones, but this is the stuff that our beloved shows are really based on. I love it!
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That's a very good question. Heh heh heh...
Not so much attached to the Junior Slayers. But if you have to kill someone...*chants* Kennedy! Kennedy!
We'll, uh, take that under advisement. :-)
This is probably the best fic I've read to date. I like reading the slash and the fluffy romance ones, but this is the stuff that our beloved shows are really based on. I love it!
Aw gosh! (blushes) Thanks for humoring our delusions of plot-intensive grandeur.